Cantāmus Support

MusicXML is a standard open format for exchanging digital sheet music (https://www.musicxml.com). This format is supported by most notation programs, including MuseScore (free), Sibelius, Finale, Noteflight and other.
Cantāmus supports all MusicXML files: compressed, with .mxl extension, or uncompressed, with .xml or .musicxml extension.

Before you can upload a PDF score to Cantāmus, you must convert it to MusicXML. You can transcribe the score manually using a notation program, but this may be a lot of work. We have partnered with My Sheet Music Transcriptions who offer a PDF-to-MusicXML transcription service. Please click here for details. You can also try to find a MusicXML version of your score online, e.g. in the CPDL website.

No, currently we don't support repeat signs and markings such as "Da Capo". We will support this in the future. For now, if you have a piece with repeat signs, you can manually "unroll" the repetitions using a notation program before uploading the score to Cantāmus. If you use MuseScore, you can do this by clicking Menu > Tools > Unroll Repeats.

No, Cantāmus supports MusicXML files exported from the latest version of MuseScore.

When synthesizing your score, Cantāmus converts the lyrics into phonemes (basic speech sounds). However, sometimes this conversion makes mistakes. There are several things you can do to improve pronunciation:

1. Make sure you select the right language when uploading the score.
2. Sometimes Cantāmus mispronounces names or foreign words. For now, there is no way to manually fix this. We may add this in the future.
3. Sometimes Cantāmus makes some sounds too long or too short. For example, for the word "train" the "n" sound could be sung too long. Cantāmus uses an algorithm to automatically choose the length of each sound. For now there is no way to manually fix this.

Cantāmus relies on syllabic marks in your score to sing the lyrics properly. Make sure the score contains proper syllabic marks:

1. All syllables in a word should be connected with hyphens.
2. Syllable that extend to more than one note should be marked with an underline.
3. Make sure that the number of syllables in each word matches the number of notes. For example, the word "Cantāmus" has 3 syllables so it should be sung with 3 notes. Notes that are connected with a tie are treated as a single note.

See the score preparation guidelines for more information.

Pronunciation is not affected by punctuation characters such as commas and periods. Punctuation is automatically removed from the lyrics.

The rendering time depends on the length of the score and on the number of voices. This is a highly intensive computational process, and currently it can take several minutes and up to half an hour for long scores. Take into account that your score might also be queued while our servers are busy rendering other scores. You can check the status of the rendering process (queued, processing, ready or error) on the Repertoire page.

The maximum length for a single score is 70 "voice minutes". Voice minutes are calculated as the piece duration multiplied by the number of voices. For example, a score that is 2 minutes long and has 4 voices will have 8 voices minutes. This limit is put in place to prevent abuse of our servers.

A score that has failed to render will not consume score credits. It can be edited and uploaded again. Any score that was rendered successfully will consume a score credit. Additionally you can edit and replace an existing score, by uploading a fixed version of a score and render it without consuming an additional credit.

Cantāmus uses a secure connection. On some older devices that are no longer updated (e.g. old versions of macOS, iOS, Firefox, or Ubuntu), our secure certificate is no longer recognized. You can safely ignore the warning and continue to use Cantāmus. This problem is not specific to Cantāmus, it happens with many websites that use the popular Let's Encrypt certificate authority. We suggest that you update your system to fix this issue. If that is not possible, and you are tech savvy, you can manually adjust your system to trust the Let's Encrypt root certificate.